Cattle, conflict and court cases: the praise poetry of Ila leadership
1984; Indiana University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1527-2044
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture analysis
ResumoMost studies of African praise poetry have concentrated on praises professionally sung for outstanding Ieaders. Even where it is recognized that ordinary persons also compose their own poems, these have been generally neglected, sometimes rather dismissively. Coupez and Kamanzi, for example, simply note that these are ex? pressed in everyday language and largely free of formalism.1 A major purpose of this article is therefore to draw attention to the existence and qualities of commoner praise poetry performed in a decentralized society without a royal tradition?the Ila of Namwala District, Zambia. A second purpose of this article is to demonstrate the essential historical context and content of this poetry. Ila poetry primarily commemorates events and in my view can only be appreciated as such. I have considered it necessary to provide a fairly detailed gloss on each poem, with more historical and cultural background than is common.2 It is worth noting in this connection that even elderly Ila with a thorough knowledge of their own traditions will not readily understand praise poetry with which they are not al? ready familiar and will themselves require an explanation. Indeed, they will regard a poem which is immediately self-evident and which lacks layers of allusion as ipso facto shallow and uninteresting. The second section of this article gives a brief account of Ila society and of the social context in which praise poetry is com? posed and sung. This section contains no esoteric information and has therefore been minimally referenced. The third and main section of the article consists of texts, trans? lations, and commentaries on fourteen Ila praise poems, of which all but the last were collected in Namwala District in 1982.3 The circumstances of the collection deserve explanation. Over the last eight years, I had collected a considerable quantity of materials on Ila history and culture and therefore included Namwala Dis? trict as one of the study areas in a project on the history of cattle keeping. During the course of this research, one of my assistants drew my attention to the potential value of poetry as a historical source and collected a number of examples. It subsequently be? came evident, as we studied the texts, that the poems had intrinsic literary value. Conversations with fellow academics and with Western-educated Ila provided strong encouragement to publish the texts as a collection. A project for video taping the performances unfortunately fell through. As the poems had not been tape-re-
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